New online Flash magazine!

[Gloo pot]

Sorry i missed some stuff, in 1 day like 15 more people have posted and geez there long...

I dont mind flash to much, but i think that maby you should utilize that fact that your site is for flashers, so there gona have usealy the most recent (Unless they have linux or somthing which i think only has 7 right now) flash and that there going to have a resolution as or even larger than 1024 x 980.. Use what flash 8 has to offer and make the site bigger.

[Boombanguk]

Sorry i missed some stuff, in 1 day like 15 more people have posted and geez there long...

I dont mind flash to much, but i think that maby you should utilize that fact that your site is for flashers, so there gona have usealy the most recent (Unless they have linux or somthing which i think only has 7 right now) flash and that there going to have a resolution as or even larger than 1024 x 980.. Use what flash 8 has to offer and make the site bigger.

I'll probably do a F8 version soonish, but right now i'm just concentrating on the content.
Sorry about the long post that was mine!

[Squize]

" I dont see why I need to download a PDF copy of interview
unless it got some good **** in there"

Guess you only read the first interview ? The 2nd one is packed to the rafters with plenty of good ****, and a little bit of **** too. Which is nice.

Squize.

[Boombanguk]

right, I'm thinking about making it html. Not that I want to do that, but it solves various issues people have brought up. At this stage I'm just thinking about it, so might not. The 2 reasons stopping me from making it html now is 1) I hate html and 2) lots of people have actually said they like the website (not just from FK), so I'm not sure what to do right, BTW.....

question about dynamic content in html. What I would like is the html to load in all the .txt files i've created, but it seems i'm going to end up with the same "not being able to be indexed by search engine" problem, is that true??

[UnknownGuy]

To load dynamic content, over better yet make a CMS(content management system), you could use a server side script + database(eg PHP and MySQL) to dynamically generate it.

Though you don't even need the database, you could mainly update it with new PHP code(I'm not sure how dynamic content works in HTML alone).

But if you built a CMS, you could say, add a news article, just giving the title and the formatted text, and the CMS would place it on the website, more automation.

And. Apache servers atleast(a popular server), have the ability to make dynamic pages look static to search engines, though I haven't used it, but there is a way.

Good luck!

[Fall_X]

There's no indexing problem if you use dynamic content. I keep reading that it's better if each page has a unique url without querystring, but search engine index dynamic pages just fine. The dynamic content is handled on the server, and you'll have pages like :
http://www.flashculture.com/article.php?id=123
http://www.flashculture.com/article.php?id=124

... etc. So all content has it's unique url for the search engines to crawl.

Dynamic content in html is only really possible with xml, but I would go for php+database.

Check out http://www.joomla.org/ for an existing cms system that you can use. Never tried it, but heard a lot of great things about it.

[token 3]

Sorry, maybe it's because I'm coming to this from a different angle than most other people; with the exception of Ray

I used to think that Flash was the be-all and end-all - that was until I left uni, I managed to somehow bluff my way into a web design company (possibly due to my flash skills) that specialises in accessability.

It was only there that I realised that in certain circumstances, flash sucks. Today, if you are providing a service to a public facing organisation, you can be sued if your site is not accessable.

We always only use flash as an enhancement, so we'll start off with a html site, fully styled - images where necessary. JavaScript is then used to embed flash content and remove html markup, to enhance the site.

Game developer or not, limiting your audience and telling them you you think they should use to view your site with, is a big mistake in business. Why would anyone want to limit the audience if there were an alternative.

You could post a link to the best rockin' flash game in the world, if I have to wait x seconds before I see something appear on screen, you've just lost a visitor, a customer, someone who could spread the good word about it. I got bored, I left, I don't care - who really lost out?

Finally, urls are incredibly useful, they convey a wealth of information:

/games/articles/my-first-one/
what am I doing? - I'm reading my first article on games

article?id=123
what am I doing, not really sure.

search engines apply the same logic, a nice clean informative url will get you noticed by search engines

Boombanguk:
I never used to like html, trut me it's generally the better option, flash is only really suited to truely interactive content and 'quirky' sites where the audience is not really too important - or to coporate giants who don't care what happens - people already know them.

if you're talking about dynamic content, a database is essential. If you're currently loandind text files into flash - what you've created is a semi-dynamic site.

I'm superbly busy, but if I can, I'll try to offer advice if you choose to go html. I don't visit FK very often, but if you drop me a PM i'll get the email notification.

Good Luck

[mclelun]

" I dont see why I need to download a PDF copy of interview
unless it got some good **** in there"

Guess you only read the first interview ? The 2nd one is packed to the rafters with plenty of good ****, and a little bit of **** too. Which is nice.

Squize.

Haha, problem is I never notice the "next" button and miss out your interview .

and there is no "Interview" links on the left menu...

-edit- I notice it will auto scroll the content. cool

article?id=123
what am I doing, not really sure.

search engines apply the same logic, a nice clean informative url will get you noticed by search engines.

I think I have read somewhere too, it seems that search engine will remove everything after the "?" symbol...

[Boombanguk]

Sorry, maybe it's because I'm coming to this from a different angle than most other people; with the exception of Ray

I used to think that Flash was the be-all and end-all - that was until I left uni, I managed to somehow bluff my way into a web design company (possibly due to my flash skills) that specialises in accessability.

It was only there that I realised that in certain circumstances, flash sucks. Today, if you are providing a service to a public facing organisation, you can be sued if your site is not accessable.

We always only use flash as an enhancement, so we'll start off with a html site, fully styled - images where necessary. JavaScript is then used to embed flash content and remove html markup, to enhance the site.

Game developer or not, limiting your audience and telling them you you think they should use to view your site with, is a big mistake in business. Why would anyone want to limit the audience if there were an alternative.

You could post a link to the best rockin' flash game in the world, if I have to wait x seconds before I see something appear on screen, you've just lost a visitor, a customer, someone who could spread the good word about it. I got bored, I left, I don't care - who really lost out?

Finally, urls are incredibly useful, they convey a wealth of information:

/games/articles/my-first-one/
what am I doing? - I'm reading my first article on games

article?id=123
what am I doing, not really sure.

search engines apply the same logic, a nice clean informative url will get you noticed by search engines

Boombanguk:
I never used to like html, trut me it's generally the better option, flash is only really suited to truely interactive content and 'quirky' sites where the audience is not really too important - or to coporate giants who don't care what happens - people already know them.

if you're talking about dynamic content, a database is essential. If you're currently loandind text files into flash - what you've created is a semi-dynamic site.

I'm superbly busy, but if I can, I'll try to offer advice if you choose to go html. I don't visit FK very often, but if you drop me a PM i'll get the email notification.

Good Luck

thanks for the offer of help, i'll probably take you up on it if I decide to go the html route!

either way, everyone seems to love the interview's so i'm going to be making them more accessable soon, perhaps even putting them on their own html page.

[Ray Beez]

Boom:
Where you have the special features, make the entire image clickable. That's how most sites do it (GameSpot, etc).

[jason merchant]

I haven't read the whole thread just pieces of it it, so sorry if I'm off topic.

Someone posted that you have interviews on the site in pdf and they didn't want to download them. If you insist on using pdfs, why not use flash paper? Its easier than acrobat, too bad adobe probably wont learn anything.

On the subject of url's, using a query string like "article?id=123" does not make your site invisible to search engines. This is archaic info, it used to be the case along time ago, but now almost all search engines can understand query strings. I say almost because there is always one of those small engines made by some kid that doesn't support it. But Google and all other major engines have supported query strings for a long time now.

Ok, mabe you still don't like the way it looks? You can use mod rewrite to make "article?id=123" look like "/games/articles/my-first-one/" and you wont be able to tell the difference. Alot of sites use this, as it lets you write your url however you want. You can even make your php page look like an html page, or anything else.

[UnknownGuy]

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...31&ctx=sibling

[jason merchant]

Yes, I do realize they say that they may cause problems, however for the most part your pages should show up. I'm not an expert at seo so I can't tell you exactly what the difference is, but from past experience with my sites I haven't had problems with query strings.

[UnknownGuy]

I wasn't disagreeing with you, just showing a link to an article about it.

[Boombanguk]

ah just hit an issue with my grand plan to re create FLashculture.com in html. I'm using web forwarding, which is fine if you just have a 1 page flash movie, but thats not going to work out too well with other html pages, any ideas?? I don't want all my pages to have domainname/flashculture/newpage1.htm types of addresses

[Ray Beez]

Who's your web host? Are you absolutely sure they will not properly host the domain?

[Boombanguk]

Well theres a name there already with the host that I'm going to do things with down the road, so i'll might as well just set up a new hosting account with someone else. I'll sort out the html website, set up the new hosting and then switch across when i'll ready.

Right now, reading up about css, and templates....ugh. Haivng fun trying to get everything positioned the way I want it to in html, dreamweavers layout cells don't seem to want to be the sizes I want them!

But i've had lots of good vibes though (not related to it being html or not! ) from people about the site, so the Flash site will be updated as I said before (news most of the time, and everything else once a week) to keep it up to date. Also got new interviews to in their soon.

[Fall_X]

Tip about html : don't use wysiwyg. It's no good. Just write plain old html, using old school tables - no absolute positioned divs, 'cause that newschool stuff sucks.
It always helps to make the design in photoshop too before working on html, by the way.

And if you're not that experienced with php stuff, I'd really recommend getting a cms tool like Joomla!. You'll have a scalable, dynamic website with lots of free plugins available, and once the content is in a database, you can always write a script to get the content into a custom system if you ever need to do so. Off course, it's more fun to roll your own right away, but it's a bit tricky to do right if you don't have much experience with it.

If you need a temporary (a couple of months) free hosting account, let me know and I'll see what I can do for you.